Modeling and design strategies for the vibration response of turbine engine rotors

Efficient, novel design and analysis methods are presented for improving the structural performance of turbine engine rotors with respect to blade vibration response. For a bladed disk, the blades are intended to be identical; however, blade-to-blade structural irregularities, known as blade mistuning, in practice are unavoidable due to manufacturing tolerances and in-service wear. Even small levels of blade mistuning may cause severe increases in blade vibration amplitudes relative to those computed for the ideal, tuned rotor. Thus, the sensitivity of bladed disks to mistuning is a serious safety, readiness, and maintenance concern for turbine engines. Hereby, the effects of blade mistuning are systematically accounted for in searching for a reliable, robust rotor design; that is, a bladed disk less sensitive to mistuning.; To this end, design analysis tools are developed for bladed disks. First, as an efficient tool for accurately predicting the vibration response of mistuned rotors, a previously developed reduced-order vibration modeling technique is extended to handle the case of mass mistuning. Even when mass mistuning occurs in small geometric regions of the blades, the enhanced technique can precisely capture free and forced vibration response of the mistuned rotors. Second, as a fast tool for approximately assessing mistuning sensitivity of rotors, a power flow analysis method is proposed. This approach enables the systematic estimation of vibration energy flow within a nominal rotor for excitation cases of interest. This dynamic information is then used to evaluate the robustness of the rotor design with respect to blade mistuning.; These tools are incorporated into the design problem of finding an optimal disk geometry to achieve minimum weight while ensuring that blade stress levels of mistuned rotors are kept below a specified safety limit. In doing so, an optimum candidate satisfying the design constraints in an approximate sense is calculated quickly using the new power flow analysis method, and a more accurate optimization is then done running a Monte Carlo simulation using the reduced-order model. For representative bladed disk assemblies, the proposed design methodology is demonstrated to yield designs less sensitive to blade mistuning while having a reduced weight relative to the original design.